I don’t know if I explained this but I pretty much believe that fun simply is the visceral feeling of learning. You can have learning without fun (for instance, if the difficulty is so evenly balanced so that it feels constant over time so that the player can’t feel themselves improving, or where your learning feels incomplete and not valuable, this can be actually terrible and cause burnout), but I don’t think you can have fun without learning something, even if it’s just learning to click on heads really fast.
So I just talk a lot about learning here. That’s all fun.
Plenty of people find fun in very different ways. Some will be happy to play the same simple Magic deck over and over 100 times, not learning anything after the first few plays, and if they win 60 of those they’ll have fun. There’s a pretty good online survey called the Gamer Motivation Survey by Quantic Foundry which asks you a bunch of questions about what motivates you to keep playing. For example, I get the highest score for Mastery (broken down into Challenge and Strategy), closely followed by Creativity (Discovery and Design). But other gamers will get very little fulfilment from Creativity and much more from Immersion (Story or Escapism) or Social (Community or Competition).
Have you ever seen non-gamers playing a game like Apples to Apples? They’re not learning anything or challenging anyone, they’ve forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they’re just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
They’re not learning anything or challenging anyone, they’ve forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they’re just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
If nothing is being learned, why does that question sound fascinating to me.
Does playing one deck not have any depth?
This might be incidental, but in both of these cases it sounds like someone is ignoring an overarching game for the sub-games. TCGs for instance consist of a core game (using the deck) and a metagame (building the deck). (I personally kinda don’t like deckbuilding, so I don’t play most of TCGs. I’m the audience for Keyforge). This individual comparison between whipped cream and spam is a small game. And it’s quite common for party games to have overarching games that aren’t really necessary. IIRC, Aella’s “game”, Askhole just dispenses completely with an overarching game, each card presents its own discrete ordeal.
I don’t know if I explained this but I pretty much believe that fun simply is the visceral feeling of learning. You can have learning without fun (for instance, if the difficulty is so evenly balanced so that it feels constant over time so that the player can’t feel themselves improving, or where your learning feels incomplete and not valuable, this can be actually terrible and cause burnout), but I don’t think you can have fun without learning something, even if it’s just learning to click on heads really fast.
So I just talk a lot about learning here. That’s all fun.
Learning is fun, but it’s not the only thing that’s fun. Anyway, when you pitch your peacewagers game, I strongly suggest you talk about fun ;)
Plenty of people find fun in very different ways. Some will be happy to play the same simple Magic deck over and over 100 times, not learning anything after the first few plays, and if they win 60 of those they’ll have fun. There’s a pretty good online survey called the Gamer Motivation Survey by Quantic Foundry which asks you a bunch of questions about what motivates you to keep playing. For example, I get the highest score for Mastery (broken down into Challenge and Strategy), closely followed by Creativity (Discovery and Design). But other gamers will get very little fulfilment from Creativity and much more from Immersion (Story or Escapism) or Social (Community or Competition).
Have you ever seen non-gamers playing a game like Apples to Apples? They’re not learning anything or challenging anyone, they’ve forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they’re just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
If nothing is being learned, why does that question sound fascinating to me.
Does playing one deck not have any depth?
This might be incidental, but in both of these cases it sounds like someone is ignoring an overarching game for the sub-games. TCGs for instance consist of a core game (using the deck) and a metagame (building the deck). (I personally kinda don’t like deckbuilding, so I don’t play most of TCGs. I’m the audience for Keyforge). This individual comparison between whipped cream and spam is a small game. And it’s quite common for party games to have overarching games that aren’t really necessary. IIRC, Aella’s “game”, Askhole just dispenses completely with an overarching game, each card presents its own discrete ordeal.